Wickr Crypto Research

Our Mission

Our mission at Wickr is to build secure communication and collaboration tools. As such, we are deeply interested in understanding, utilizing and advancing the state of the art in Cryptology. With that in mind, we have built a Cryptology research and development program to:

Cryptology “Cryptology” consists of two very closely related sub-fields. The study of building secure information processing systems (aka “Cryptography”) as well as breaking the security of such systems (aka “Cryptanalysis”).

Prepare for emerging and future threats and paradigm shifts in a timely fashion: For example: shifting to Post Quantum-secure cryptography in order to protect today’s communication from tomorrow’s attackers potentially armed with a large scale quantum computer.

Collaborate with and give back to the wider crypto and security communities (i.e., participating at the highest levels of international peer reviewed research, developing new industry standards for secure communication and collaborating on open source projects).

Research Programs

Secure Messaging Protocols

A secure messaging protocol (SMP) is the collection of procedures that use cryptographic schemes to send and receive messages (and other data such as files, VOIP streams, and more).

Publications

Moderately Hard Computation

Information processing tasks require various digital resources including storage, network bandwidth and/or computation. In the physical world, we often measure the value of resources in terms of their monetary cost.

Publications

Joël Alwen is Wickr’s Chief Cryptographer. In this role he leads Wickr’s Cryptography Research & Development program while also helping design, vet and improve Wickr’s use of cryptographic technology.

Joël received his PhD in cryptography from NYU. He has 15 years experience in the field during which he worked at some of the most renowned academic and industry research institutions around the world including MIT, Harvard, ETH Zurich, IST Austria, NTT Japan and SRI Labs. His academic work is regularly published at the highest tier international cryptography and security venues including, for example, his work receiving the Best Paper Award at Eurocrypt 2017. His research spans a wide variety of crypto and security topics including Secure Message Protocols, Post Quantum Cryptography, Distributed Consensus & Blockchains, Moderately Hard Computation, Leakage Resilient Cryptography, Multiparty Computation & Cryptography and Zero Knowledge Protocols.

His cryptographic interests go hand in hand with his information security work which has included such projects as reverse engineering US Secret Service’s mass-surveillance technology in laser printers, improving and implementing a complete and practical break of the (very widely used) MIFARE Classic RFID technology as well as winning the IPV6 Pentesting capture-the-flag competition at DeepSec 2015.